With the Persian Expedition

by Martin Henry Donohoe

The news of the Turkish success, much magnified in passing from mouth to mouth and village to village, had preceded our arrival, and the barometer of bazaar sentiment, always a sure gauge of Persian public opinion, had veered round to "stormy."

And "stormy" it was to be. It was felt that the sands of the British glass had run out. The attitude of the people underwent a sudden change from cringing supplication to one of thinly veiled hostility. Fawning officials, who had battened upon our liberality and profited by our largesse, now fell over themselves in their efforts to sponge the slate clean and write upon it a Persian improvised version of the "Hymn of Hate." They threw the full weight of their mean souls into the job. In the bazaar they buzzed about like so many poisonous gadflies, and in order to curry favour with their new masters-to-be they incited the people to anti-British demonstrations, and beat and imprisoned humble folk whose friendship for our nation was disinterested and had not been offered on the local commercial basis of so many krans per pound. With one exception, all the district notables—who had always been reiterating their professions of friendship, and to whom we had paid large sums as subsidies for faithless, turn-tail levies, or as purchase price for grain—went over to the enemy. Our Mianeh police, my own command, or those of them who were Persians, followed the general example and ran off to join the Turks.

There was one notable exception. Four Kurds who belonged to the police and who could not be intimidated or cajoled, stood firm and refused to be carried off by the wave of desertion, and they remained to guard the Mission premises.

After Turkmanchai we did not tarry long in Mianeh. Preparations were at once made for a further retirement. The Turks were coming on slowly and methodically, and apparently in no immediate hurry to hustle us out of Mianeh. The long and, in a sense, rapid marches of the previous five days during hot weather had told upon the Turkish infantry, and now the advancing enemy had cried a halt in order that his tired troops might enjoy a brief repose.

Our next defensive position was the Kuflan Kuh or Qaplan Kuh (the panthers' hill) Pass, which lies five miles south-east of Mianeh. The main range of the Kuflan Kuh runs roughly from east to west, and the Tabriz-Zinjan road passes over its crest at a height of about five thousand feet. At the end of the Mianeh plain, and some two miles from the village itself, there is a solid brick bridge over the Karangu River. Once the river is crossed, coming from Mianeh, the rise begins gradually, and the foothills of the Pass are met with a mile or so from the river bank. The ascent from the northern or Mianeh end is very difficult, and the road mounts between two perpendicular walls of rock. The gradient is steep, and the outer edge of the roadway was wholly unprotected until a British labour corps took the job on hand and interposed a coping-stone barrier between the exposed side of the road and the abyss below. The same workers also plugged up some of the gaping holes in the roadway which had existed from time immemorial.

On Sunday, September 8th, the whole of Major Wagstaff's force bade farewell without regret to Mianeh, marched across the Karangu, and placed the formidable barrier of the Kuflan Kuh between itself and the advancing enemy. Wagstaff established his headquarters in a ruined caravanserai near the stone bridge which spans the Kizil Uzun River at the southern entrance to the Pass. All the stores of wheat and barley which had been accumulating in Mianeh were destroyed before evacuation, and the rearguard crossed the Karangu without molestation either from the Turks or from their new allies, the Mianehites, who were hourly showing themselves more hostile to the retiring British.

NORTH GATE, KASVIN.

Headquarters at Kasvin now began to be alarmed at the uninterrupted southward advance of the Turks, for, if Zinjan fell, Kasvin might be expected to follow, and our line of communications from Hamadan towards the Caspian would be cut. General Dunsterville himself was away in Baku, fighting Bolsheviks and Turks. Some weeks earlier, with the help of Bicherakoff and his Russians, he had rooted out Kuchik Khan from his jungle fastness, and opened the road from Manjil to Resht and the Caspian Sea.